Minor milestone

It takes me about a year to fill one of these extended 400 page Moleskine notebooks. I use it as a general purpose journal, a place for thoughts of varying dubious quality, occasional recipes, diary entries (when I can remember), notes on this or that, quotes, reference lookups, random marginalia, mental bric-a-brac. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes more of a chore, but I try to add something as often as I can. I followed Julia Cameron’s morning pages routine for a while, dashing off three before coffee. It’s a useful technique for tricking you to write when you don’t want to, with countless YouTube videos proclaiming it a transformative experience, but its overstated.

I like the 400 page soft bound version because there is something reassuring about its heft, and the way it shows its age after a few months kicking around inside my workbag. I previously preferred the standard hard bound edition, only these don’t lie flat as easily and it’s nice to have something that will last the year. The only drawback with Moleskine, other than the exorbitant price (£24 for a notebook thievery) is the paper quality, which like so many things we once counted upon as sacrosanct, like Doc Marten boots and baseline democratic values, has declined in recent years. I like to use either a fountain pen or a Mitsubishi uni-ball, both of which tend to bleed through. I’ve tried a few other reputable notebooks, one or two specifically designed for fountain pens, and yet despite its flaws I keep coming back to the Moleskine.

Opening an old notebook from 2023/4 at random I see that I recorded how to take a cutting from a Chilean Potato plant while the next page detail’s a recipe for English muffins, which I’m sure never bothered to make. This is accompanied by a quote from philosopher Maurice Marleau-Ponty: ‘One speaks with his obsessions his secret history’ which I think you’ll agree is a corker. A few pages on there’s a long narrative entry about the day Debbie and I purchased an oil painting from a local artist (Angie Porter) in Bridport, Dorset. It’s the painting that greets us every time we walk through the front door, and we love it. Angie is Australian and told us that on a day when she’d felt unusually homesick she took herself off to the botanical garden where she sketched some “bottle brushes”, a plant native to her homeland, and which now sits in a handsome upcycled frame in our hallway. Scanning down the page there is a scribbled note reminding me that on the same day I tried and enjoyed taleggio cheese for the first time (strong, feety, creamy), and I like how these little details help me to recall what was for us a very special day.

So, nothing particularly profound, just little incidental insights and reminders that might otherwise be forgotten. David Sedaris has a good line about keeping a journal, and how, over time you stop writing for an imagined critics and admirers and instead begin to write with the kind of honesty that you wouldn’t ordinarily want others to see. Jung might call it your shadow self, and there’s something to that, the little slips and unexpected moments of unguarded, even unintentional unsettled self-reflection. Re-reading old notebooks you can easily spot those moments, rare as they are, when your writing has its strongest resonance, moments which give pause and cause to wonder whether you might be quoting someone else because the writing is somehow different, a touch uncanny, or maybe just better. You’re confronting that version of yourself that prefers to sit at the back, and it can be an uncomfortable realisation just how much that passes for personality is pretence.

I don’t re-read journals as a habit but will occasionally leaf through one just to see if there is anything worth carrying forward. It’s not an exercise in ego but something closer to curation or taking inventory. A gathering together, with a magpie’s instinct for the curious, and in no particular order, those things that felt important at the time.